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Onboarding your hire

What makes a loyal and productive employee?• It may be the pay you offer.• It may be your perks.• It may be fulfilling work.

It may be all of those things, but in some cases it starts from the first day your new employee enters your office.

Why the First Days Are ImportantIt’s in those first days where the employee will learn a lot about your company. It’s where they’ll learn about who your company is and what their role will be. It’s where they’ll meet your coworkers and make a first impression on management. It’s where they’ll start training and learn what they’ll be doing at their job.

Companies that have processes for new hires to ensure that they are able to enter your company trained and ready for the position are more likely to have loyal, productive employees that do great work right away and become assets in your company. Those that don’t often have frustrated employees that do not know what they need to do and already feel as if something is off.

These processes are known as on-boarding, and they’re a growing trend in modern day employment.

Why Onboarding MattersAsk any manager why one of their subordinates is not working hard and you’ll likely get a range of responses that all relate to an employee’s character. But what if it’s something that your company caused? What if the employee:• Was not trained properly.• Doesn’t know their coworkers and is shy/uncomfortable.• Isn’t clear on how the business operates.

Imagine the employee’s perspective, where the individual came to work and wasn’t properly trained or didn’t get to know enough about the company and now feels lost and helpless. It affects not only their production through lack of training – it affects their production even AFTER they’ve learned how to handle their roles because by then:• They’ve lost that confidence in the position.• Most of the managers will look at that employee poorly.• They haven’t developed work habits at your organization.

On-boarding matters a great deal, because making sure each employee is ready to do their job is crucial for effective hiring.

What is Involved in Onboarding?Onboarding involves making sure that plans are in place to properly train every employee and habituate them to the working environment. You’ll need to have a plan, and that plan needs to address things like:

• Training – First and foremost, training is crucial. Your onboarding plan needs to be carefully analyzed to ensure that it is training every employee perfectly on all of the tasks they need to do – even if a task is something simple like buying pens. What websites? Who’s credit card? When? Everything should be covered.

• Introductions – The new employee should have an opportunity to sit down and meet people, getting to know their coworkers and managers. They should know exactly what their role is, who they report to, who reports to them, what they should ask about, HOW they should ask (phone? Email?), and anything related to the people they’re going to see every day.

• Setup – Disorganization on your part shows the new employee that your workplace is disorganized. Make sure everything is set up – the computer is ready, the badges are printed, and anything the employee will need starting at day one is ready for them and working properly.

• Business Culture – You should also make sure the employee is well-versed in your specific business culture. How do you all dress on a regular basis? How do you prefer they answer phones? What are they expected to bring every day? Do people decorate their desks? These questions/answers are very important to all new employees, and the more you educate them the better they’ll be.

• Checking the Plan – You’ll also want a system of checks in place to make sure that your on-boarding plan is being used correctly, and that everything that you hoped would come from your on-boarding process is what’s occurring.Finally, you’ll also want to use research tools to make sure that what you believe is an effective onboarding plan is actually working. It’s strongly recommended that you run a new hire survey, where you ask the new employee anonymously if they were properly trained, if they feel ready for the position, if they know their coworkers and their role in the company, and so on.

Creating the Perfect New HireWhen you hire a new employee, it’s not uncommon to think in terms of “them” when it comes to their production. Who are they? Are they choosing to produce or are they showing negative characteristics? What is holding them back?

But there are always things that you as a company can and should be doing to make sure that the employee is put in the best possible position to succeed. An employee with poor training is an employee whose failure is the company’s fault.

An employee that is trained perfectly, given all the information they need to thrive, and shown what their role is in the company is going to be an employee whose production is their own responsibility, as you gave them all of the tools they needed to succeed.

You need to hire the right people, and companies like Recruit Shop are here to make sure you have the best people coming into your company. But you also need to make sure you put them in a position to be successful, and that’s what on-boarding is for. Consider creating an on-boarding process and monitoring it through careful research to make sure that every employee is ready to succeed.